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SLI & RAID support?


puzzled

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  • 3 weeks later...

I've run through a bunch of Linux distro CD's & DVD's over the past week. The only one that even mentions RAID is Fedora 7. At least it's a start towards one objective. I'll be testing it out this week to see if it indeed does RAID. Hopefully SATA RAID & not IDE.

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Not really sure what your question is? Why would you want SLI in linux? And Linux doesn't really like software raid in general. But maybe be more clear on what you want and what your question is?

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I'd like to enable both video cards in SLI using the NF4 chipset on the motherboard. I'd also like to enable the NV RAID chipset. I was able to load Fedora 7 on a single SATA HD yesterday. That was more than some of the other distros allowed. I'll try to enable the RAID chipset today.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Fedora 7 looks like it's the proper distribution for the job. Nvidia has the Linux SLI driver available. It looks like it's my lack of knowledge that is keeping me from getting this done.

 

most distros that offer the linux-2.6 kernel provide SOFTWARE RAID or HARDWARE RAID support. you just need to setup your arrays with mdadm. I should be adding RAID support to my Gentoo guide soon, just been busy with work and angry girlfriend that wants my attention.

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the linux software raid is superior in performance than the nv_raid.

 

both are done in software.

 

real raid cards cost $200+ and have a dedicated cpu for the xor and address calculations.

 

nv_raid is nothing more than a BIOS interface to software raid.

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the linux software raid is superior in performance than the nv_raid.

 

both are done in software.

 

real raid cards cost $200+ and have a dedicated cpu for the xor and address calculations.

 

nv_raid is nothing more than a BIOS interface to software raid.

 

glad somebody is pointing that out :)

 

also nv_raid arrays will only work on the board in which they was create, this is also true with many HARDWARE raid boards.. with the Linux Software RAID you are able to edit,delete,recreate,merge or whatever on your RAID arrays on any Linux Distribution that has RAID support enabled.

 

here are a few more reasons why SOFTWARE RAID is the way to go.

 

  1. Potential for increased hardware and software biodiversity
  2. Kernel engineers have much greater ability to diagnose and fix problems, as opposed to a closed source firmware. This has often been a problem in the past, with hardware RAID.
  3. Disk format is public
  4. ...thus, no vendor lock-in: Your data is not stored in a vendor-proprietary format.
  5. A controller-independent, vendor-neutral layout means disks can be easily moved between controllers. Sometimes a complete backup+restore is required even when moving between hardware RAID models from the same vendor.
  6. Eliminates single-points-of-failure (SPOF) compared to similar configurations of hardware RAID.
  7. RAID5 XOR runs on host CPU, which practically guarantees that it is far faster than the pitiful hardware RAID microcontrollers.
  8. RAID5 XOR speed increases as host CPU speeds increase.
  9. RAID speed increases as host CPU count (multi-thread, multi-core) increases, following current market trends.
  10. Cost. A CPU and memory upgrade is often cheaper and more effective than buying an expensive RAID card.
  11. Level of abstraction. Linux software RAID can distribute data across ATA, SCSI, iSCSI, SAN, network or any other block device. It is block device agnostic. Hardware RAID most likely cannot even span a single card.
  12. Hardware RAID has a field history of bad firmwares corrupting data, locking up, and otherwise behaving poorly under load. (certainly this is highly dependent on card model and firmware version)
  13. Hardware RAID firmwares have a very limited support lifetime. You cannot get firmware updates for older hardware. Sometimes the vendor even ceases to exist.
  14. Each hardware RAID has a different management interface, and level of feature support.
  15. Your hardware RAID featureset is largely locked in stone, at purchase time. With software RAID, the featureset grows with time, as new features are added to Linux... no hardware upgrade required.
  16. Additional RAID mode support. Most hardware controllers don't support RAID-6 as Linux software RAID does, and Linux will soon be adding RAID-5E and RAID-6E support.
  17. Error handling and logging varies from vendor to vendor (and card to card), with hardware RAID.
  18. Many ATA-based hardware RAID solutions either (a) fail to manage disk lifetimes via SMART, or (B) manage SMART diagnostics in a non-standard way.

 

ofcourse some people might think hardware raid is the way to go, so here are some good reasons why hardware is better than software raid.

 

  1. Software RAID may saturate PCI bus bandwidth long before a hardware RAID card does (this presumes multiple devices on a single PCI bus).
  2. RAID5 XOR calculations are performed on the host CPU (as opposed to offloaded, in hardware RAID situation).
  3. Battery backup on high end cards allows faster journalled rebuilds.
  4. Battery-backed write-back cache may improve write throughput.

 

 

for my critical data i prefer to use an open-source solution. You don't want your sensitive data to be on hardware lock-in. You want your DATA to be free!

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  • 3 weeks later...

I tried out several more distros in search of one I would be comfortable using on a notebook. Out of curiosity I tried Sabayon on the SLI system with the RAID array. It was the only one in about a dozen attempts that actually went live. It now recognizes both hard drives. I then tried the installer & it has sda & sdb selected as the drives to use for installation.It asked to set up users & passwords. It then tried to install but came up with an error exemption. Any suggestions?

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I tried out several more distros in search of one I would be comfortable using on a notebook. Out of curiosity I tried Sabayon on the SLI system with the RAID array. It was the only one in about a dozen attempts that actually went live. It now recognizes both hard drives. I then tried the installer & it has sda & sdb selected as the drives to use for installation.It asked to set up users & passwords. It then tried to install but came up with an error exemption. Any suggestions?

 

posting the error might help. :D

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